The Impact of Community Health Workers on Child Malnutrition in the Philippines

This study will focus on a new community health worker (CHW) program called 'Flourish', which is implemented by Philippine non-governmental organization (NGO) International Care Ministries (ICM). ICM's core program is 'Transform', which is a poverty alleviation program that focuses on households living in ultra-poverty (less than 0.50 United States dollars (USD) per person per day). Transform leverages local community networks to identify 30 participants from the most marginalized households in the community. ICM then provides these participants with 15 weeks of health and livelihood education, as well as with health interventions, including childhood malnutrition treatment.

In ICM's Flourish program, one of the 30 participants in each Transform program is nominated by their peers to become an ICM-supported CHW. The CHWs will not only provide health services after the conclusion of the Transform program for their fellow Transform participants' households, but they will also serve an additional 50+ households in their communities. These additional 'non-Transform' households will be identified by asking the Transform participants to nominate peers in their social networks that share similar socioeconomic backgrounds and whose households are perceived to also benefit from CHW services.

The primary aim of this research is to assess the impact of CHWs on the prevalence of acute childhood malnutrition in hard-to-reach households within low-income communities.

The investigators hypothesize that this study will show that CHWs are able to reduce the prevalence of acute childhood malnutrition in hard-to-reach households within low-income communities.